Chillers from the Rock

Slave to the Axe Song

Fantasy from the Rock

sci-fi from the rock

Canadian Creatures

Writing level-up: I’s got me a editor!

While I have no ambition to be anything more than a part-time author, that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be a GOOD writer, and for that I need help.

There is a very interesting anthology in the works (Chillers from the Rock), and I would like to submit a short story for consideration. I’ve gone through my story a couple times myself in an attempt to clean it up, “show NOT tell”, and even read it aloud to check for pauses and such.

I was going to run it through “Grammarly” and then send it off, but instead I decided to think about this for a minute, ok maybe more than a minute.

Almost every member of my online writing group uses an editor of some sort or another, and they have honest to goodness novels to their name. So I started sniffing around, asked some buddies what they used an editor for, and was quite surprised. Coherence, consistent voice, grammar, and spelling, all things that I need help with, though was surprised that they also struggled.

While they are “leap & bounds” ahead of me, I also realized that sometimes a writer can be too close to their work, too emotionally invested in it, and fail to see pitfalls.

So, I made some inquires, got a excellent recommendation of a freelance editor within my budget, made contact and am taking the plunge. I sent off my draft the other day, and am expecting a summary of the first couple pages by the weekend.

Whether of not my little story gets accepted in “CftR” or elsewhere has now become less important, making it a better story has.

3 thoughts on “Writing level-up: I’s got me a editor!”

I can edit other people’s writing, but not my own. There’s a limit as to how far I polish my own musings. I think the reason is because as authors, we’re all too close to our stories and characters. Therefore, some things are just blatantly obvious to us, and we can’t put ourselves into the mind of a reader who is essentially a blank slate.